NEWS: Sportswear brands in race to the bottom for Winter Olympics

The widespread abuse of workers rights in sportswear supply chains is now well known. Most of the large sportswear retailers have developed policies that they claim will tackle these issues. Yet substantial violations of worker rights and poverty wages are still the norm for hundreds of thousands of workers in the sportswear industry.

On the eve of the Beijing Olympics the Playfair coalition, which includes the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) in Canada, the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) in Europe, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Union (ITGLWF), put forward a series of demands which aimed to help clear some of the major hurdles which continue to prevent any genuine and sustained improvements. Each of the detailed, concrete demands corresponded to one of the following four hurdles identified by workers as key obstacles to improving workers rights:

Asr the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver gets underway, we wrote to the main sportswear brands to see how they are progressing on these demands. A new site, Cleaing the Hurdles, has now been launched to show the winners and losers in the race to improve conditions for workers all over the world.

The website, compiled by the Playfair alliance along with its Canadian partner, the Maquila Solidarity Network, presents the responses from Nike, adidas, Pentland, Puma, Lotto, New Balance, Asics and Mizuno on their willingness to meet 12 of the 36 hurdles identified in the original report. 

  • Nike
  • adidas
  • Pentland
  • Puma
  • Lotto
  • New Balance
  • Asics
  • Mizuno

For more information on the detailed demands see the Clearing the Hurdles website or download the original report

 

 

 

Last modified on Wednesday, 09 November 2011 13:12
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